"I have had nearly enough bullshit. The manure has piled up so deep in the hallways, classrooms, and administration buildings of American higher education that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity."
--Christian Smith, Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Education-Is-Drowning/242195
If Professor Smith is really all that worried about it, he might try taking an interest in the checkable sciences, in which results must stand up to remain relevant. But of course, no less than Allan Bloom pointed out that the natural sciences are very much an academy within the academy, detached from whatever else is going on, and continuing to produce great things lately---whenever we're not being slandered by an orange person.
ReplyDeleteHmm. . .while I certainly don't agree with everything he's saying, I do find myself agreeing with much of it. One caveat: I may be somewhat biased in his favor, since I've heard him speak (in a non-academic context) about his research (on how members of the younger generations think about organized religion, spirituality, and related matters). He's an engaging speaker, and his ideas have significantly influenced conversations about the future in my own church. The methodology he described also seemed sound to me, but I'm not professionally qualified to judge that in any detail.
ReplyDeleteOf the issues he raises, I especially worry about this: "BS is third-tier universities offering mediocre graduate programs to train second-rate Ph.D. students for jobs that do not exist, whose real function is to provide faculty with graduate RAs and to justify the title of "university."
In fact, I worry that even high-quality Ph.D. programs at high-quality universities exist at least in part to justify graduate classes for tenure-line professors to teach, and to move the institution as far up the R1, R2, etc. scale as possible (a scale which I doubt was originally meant to be prescriptive/aspirational rather than descriptive, but which has become so).
On the other hand, I continue to have my doubts about narratives suggesting that free speech in the classroom, or on campus generally, is imperiled by attacks from either the left or the right. I may be extraordinarily lucky, or extraordinarily oblivious, but I'm still seeing more evidence of isolated instances which have forced individual institutions to struggle with drawing and redrawing boundaries than of a clear trend.